


oh, let me be your teddy bear

by jokeperalta



Category: Timeless (TV 2016)
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Fluff and mild angst, One Shot, Pre-Relationship, Teddy Bears, Unresolved Romantic Tension, here it is, i'm not sure about this but, lucy thinks too much; wyatt is sweet as heck but won't admit it, rated for language
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-20
Updated: 2017-10-20
Packaged: 2019-01-20 06:48:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,607
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12427209
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jokeperalta/pseuds/jokeperalta
Summary: There’s a sliding scale of Changes to the Life of Lucy Preston Caused By Time Travel, ranging from the monumental (losing a beloved sister), the huge (gaining a previously-unknown-from-Adam fiancé)…. and then there’s the plain absurd.





	oh, let me be your teddy bear

**Author's Note:**

> I came up with this idea before I even finished watching Timeless and it got way long when I actually started to write it down. There’s no particular canon setting except that the first three parts happen towards the beginning of s1 and the last part happens towards the end, but before Wyatt goes back to save Jessica/Rittenhouse take over Mason Industries.
> 
> Honestly, I just hope this comes out even slightly more profound than the concept and the Elvis song it’s titled after suggests.

 

There’s a sliding scale of Changes to the Life of Lucy Preston Caused By Time Travel, ranging from the monumental (losing a beloved sister), the huge (gaining a previously-unknown-from-Adam fiancé)…. and then there’s the plain absurd.

“Mom?”

Lucy pulls up her bed sheets once more, and drops again to her knees to examine under her bed with her phone’s torch. The room is a mess in her wake, drawers left open, cupboards askew.

Her mother tuts when she comes to the door way. “Hurricane Lucy strikes again- I hope you’re going to tidy up after yourself. What on earth are you looking for?”

Lucy leans her elbows on the bed. “Do you know where Ted is?”

“What?”

“Ted the Bear. I left him here somewhere… and I can’t find him. Did you put him in the attic or something?”

Her mother stares at her, nonplussed. “Lucy, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Come on, my bear. I left him on my bed in here.” No recognition. It feels bizarre that she’s having to explain this: her mom (and Amy… before, anyway) teased her regularly about her enduring attachment to him—her ‘first love’, the man all future men would have to compete with. “My favourite toy growing up- I took him everywhere with me until I was like, eleven or something?”

“Your old teddy bear?” Her mother finally asks after much contemplation. “Honey, you threw your bear out years ago. I think I gave it to the Mission charity with a bunch of your old toys, don’t you remember?”

“No…?”

“Yes, I remember now. You had some girls from school over for a slumber party one weekend when you were fourteen and you were embarrassed to let to them see your toys, so you gave me a box of them to give to goodwill.”

None of this is right. Starting with the fact that she never had a slumber party with any girls from school, literally ever. She was the gawky older sister who awkwardly hung around when her sister held parties, never had them herself.

And Ted the Bear was with her through all of it. Her gangly, acne-ridden teenage years. She took him to college with her, hugged him when she cried and felt homesick in her dorm room. He was the unofficial mascot of Tequila Mockingbird, her intersectional feminist girl band.

Almost every era of her life she has features him in some way. Him and his patchy threadbare fur she’d worn down to almost nothing over the years.  
  
He sat on her desk when she got her first tiny pokey office, stayed on her various desks while she wrote her PhD, her first book, while she graded essays and wrote articles. Right up until a particularly clumsy freshman tripped on a chair leg and spilled a full bottle of water over him and pretty much everything else on her desk—at which point Lucy decided he should live out his retirement in slightly more safe and comfortable surroundings.

The cause should have occurred to her earlier really.

“The fucking Hindenburg,” Lucy mutters under her breath.

It almost beggars belief. Ted the Bear is such a minuscule detail of her entire life in relative terms, yet something they changed in 1937 apparently directly relates to her high school popularity whether she keeps one of her most treasured possessions.

And now he’s gone.

A new wave of isolation washes over her bleakly. It isn’t losing Amy, of course. Not even close. But it is an extra layer of this, of feeling like a stranger in her own life. Sometimes it’s like this timeline was set up to make her lonely – Amy gone, a mother she couldn’t be open with anymore, a fiancé she didn’t love.

“What did you say?” Her mother asks.

Lucy swallows. “Nothing. I guess I forgot.”

 

 

/

 

 

“Any new life changes lately, Lucy?” Rufus asks, while he prepares the Lifeboat.

Lucy sighs. “My bear is gone too now, apparently, but other than that-” Wyatt looks up from buckling her seatbelt and Rufus actually turns his chair to give her a matching blank look. Lucy feels stupid for mentioning him already but- “My favourite teddy, from my childhood. I called him Ted the Bear.”

“You were a creative child, I take it?” Rufus asks with an eye roll.

“Har har. I’ve had him my whole life but apparently, fourteen-year-old me in this timeline is too cool for bears and my mom gave him to some Christian Mission charity or something.”

“Us changing the Hindenburg changed _that_?”

“So it seems,” Lucy says. She feels every bit as incredulous as he sounds.

Wyatt clicks her seatbelt into place. “Well, no offence, Lucy, but I don’t think Agent Christopher’s gonna commission a jump to save your toy anytime soon.”

Wyatt’s using that dismissive voice again-- the one that tops the fairly substantial list she’s compiling of Things Lucy Preston Hates About Wyatt Logan. And okay, maybe it is stupid to complain about a stuffed animal in front of a guy who lost his wife. But she’s not the one who brought it up and it doesn’t make his tone any less unnecessary.

“Shall we?” Wyatt asks impatiently, gesturing to the controls in front of Rufus. Rufus gives her a pointed _just-ignore-him_ look and turns back to the Lifeboat panel.

 

/

 

 

Around twelve hours later, Wyatt murmurs to her: “Tell me about Ted.”

Lucy barely hears him over the sound of her own heart drumming in her rib cage, the sick sensation of blood pulsing in her eardrums. There’s intermittent gunfire outside the door of the dark shed they occupy, and barely enough room inside to lift her arms at forty-five degree angles from her body. She’s sure something crawled over her foot just now and she’s trying so hard -so hard- to keep it together, her face is hot with the effort of not sobbing about how much she hates this. How much she hates every decision anyone ever made to lead her here, including her own.

She wants to be with her mom, with her sister. She wants to be grading a hundred subpar freshman papers citing Wikipedia pages as sources in her office where the A/C never works and the coffee sucks. Fuck, just anywhere but here.

“What?” Her dry throat cracks her voice.

“Your teddy. Why was it-why was he special to you?”

Here of all places, trapped in a flimsy wooden box, one that could well become their coffin at any moment, with guns all round them -- he wants to know about her bear.

“It doesn’t even matter,” she whispers back harshly.

“He mattered to you,” Wyatt counters. “Tell me.”

She hasn’t much to lose right now. If these end up being her last thoughts and words, at least they’ll be about something pleasant, as opposed to thinking about the real or perceived spiders she’s sure she can feel crawling up her petticoats.

“He was- when he was new, he was all yellow fur and the label said his name was ‘Butter’ but I thought that was a stupid name for a bear.”

“Ergo… Ted the Bear,” Wyatt supplies softly, amused.

Lucy laughs too, between jagged breaths. The sound surprises her. “Yeah. And he has this… pink velvet ribbon around his neck that I used to be obsessed with running between my grubby little fingers so it kind of turned more grey than pink over the years. I basically almost destroyed him with my aggressive love.”

The more she talks, the easier it seems to get. She feels him shrug next to her, brushing her shoulder with his. “I can think of worse ways to go,” he says. He doesn’t give her a chance to work out what the heck that means. ‘”When d’you get him?”

“I was- four, I think. Saw him in a dollar store and just imprinted on him, I guess. My parents tried to wean me off him with more expensive toys, but he was my one and only.” Lucy huffs a laugh. “He always smelled like home, wherever I was. Now I don’t even feel at home when I’m at home, and he’s gone as well. So.”

Ridiculous, pincer-hot tears prick again. She scrubs her hand hard under her eyes. They could fucking die at any moment and here she is, crying about a goddamn toy.

“Hey,” Wyatt says, and his gentle tone almost makes it worse. God, he’s never Mr Dismissive Dick Wyatt when she really needs him to be. She needs snapping out of herself, to stop assigning meaning and portent to things that don’t matter in the slightest in the grand scheme of things.

“It’s stupid, and you know it, you don’t need to be nice to me about it.”

Their hands touch in the blackness. He isn’t holding her hand, not really, just loosely holding two of her fingers between his. Heat radiates from the point of contact up her arm. He’s like a walking furnace.

“Well, tough shit, ma’am, cause that’s exactly what I’m gonna do.” Lucy snorts, briefly but loud and embarrassing. She’s glad he can’t see her: red faced, sweaty and snotty-nosed. “I get it, I do. After Jessica…-” he doesn’t need to say it “-I clung on to anything that reminded me of her. You just want your world to make sense again, that’s all it is. We all do.”

She’s written entire books, she’s trained herself to give nearly perfect presentations to eminent academics who wouldn’t hesitate to point out any mincing of words. But she doesn’t know she has the same way with words that comes to Wyatt naturally. To make words meaningful like he does. It all sounds so simple, so rational, when it comes from him. Not the messy, contradictory explanations she tries to give herself.

“And you’ll feel at home again, someday. You’ll get that back, I know it.”

Lucy breathes the stale air in deeply. She lets herself believe him, soak in his faith, just for a minute.

The door creaks open and a column of blinding light falls on them.

“You guys just gonna stay in there all day or…?” Rufus asks. She hadn’t even realised the gunfire had stopped. Gingerly feeling her way to the exit, Lucy feels the hand she was holding a few seconds ago reach out behind her to steady her movements.

 

 

/

 

 

  
“That patch of wall particularly historically noteworthy or something?”

Lucy startles out of a daze. Wyatt and his familiar half-smirk are walking towards her sitting on a chair on the edge of the costume department.

“I thought you’d be long gone by now,” he says.

She blinks twice, then smiles back. “I am. I mean, I will be. I’m supposed to be somewhere actually, but I just…” she searches for the words but all she finds is a drawn out sigh. She looks at him “…you know?”

“I get what you mean.” She isn’t surprised. He always does. “Big plans tonight?”

“No.” She pauses, then amends, “Yes. Kind of-... I don't know.”

“You know you just gave every possible answer to that question, right?” Wyatt’s amused. Lucy shakes her head at herself. “And now you have to tell me.”

Lucy rubs the heels of her hands over her eye sockets. It's exactly what she didn’t want anyone here to know. 

“It’s my birthday today,” she tells him finally. He raises his eyebrows and rocks back on his heels in surprise. “I know, another revolution of the earth around the sun since I was born, yippee for me. I just don’t really feel like celebrating tonight.”

“Has _Noah_ got something planned?” He’s got that faint note of distaste he always has when her new timeline fiancé is brought up. Lucy never knows quite what to do with it so she files it away for future pondering.

“No, he had to work. He said he’d going to make it up to me.” Wyatt purses his lips and Lucy decides it’s better to ramble on before either she reads too much into it or he feels the need to make comment. That can of worms is best left unopened. “I’m supposed to be having dinner with my mom, she bought a bottle of champagne especially for us, and that’s great and everything but…”

“You miss Amy.”

Lucy looks at him and smiles tiredly. “Am I really that predictable?”

He grins back. “Never.”

“This is my first birthday without her and it just feels… wrong, to celebrate it without her. To celebrate anything without her.” Wyatt nods and she knows he knows exactly what she’s talking about. “Every year, she’d always threaten to throw me a massive surprise party with everyone I know because she knew I’d hate it. And of course, that’s exactly why she never did. But god… if I went home now and she was waiting with every single person I’ve ever met in my life and yelled ‘surprise!’ at me, I’m pretty sure I’d be the happiest person on the planet.”

Lucy looks away under his intense gaze in an attempt to rein her emotions in. She waits for him to say something, or duck out of there because he’s so goddamn tired of hearing her ramble on about her sister, but neither happens for a good few minutes.

Then he says: “Come with me.”

Wyatt doesn’t answer the questions in her eyes, just inclines his head and starts walking with purpose. He doesn’t look behind to see if she’s following. Lucy lingers, trying to work out what’s going on and failing, before scrambling upwards and jogging to catch up with him.

He leads her almost all the way out and for a crazy moment, she thinks he’s about to lead right outside and take her out for a impromptu birthday night out on the town or something. She isn’t even sure she’d say no to that either. Which is pretty bad, considering she has a devoted mother waiting for her at home and a devoted fiancé out there saving lives and thinking of her.

But he doesn’t. He instead brings her to their lockers, the ones they were assigned with the Mason Industries staff lockers, to leave their things in when travelling to the back of beyond in a time machine.

“I wasn’t sure when to give this to you,” he says while he swipes his keycard over the mechanism. He rummages while Lucy tries her very best not to be nosy and peek inside the intriguing new world of What Wyatt Logan Keeps in His Locker. “But now it’s a birthday present, so… happy birthday.”

He finally pulls out a softly bulging brown paper bag, folded over at one end. It’s light and squishy when he hands it to her. Lucy stares at him.

“Go on,” he says, impatiently.

Her hand closes around something soft and worn, something she’s definitely felt before. A sound she’s never made before, somewhere caught between a laugh and a sob, escapes her throat when she pulls it into the light.

“Ted,” she whispers. Her knees feel weak with shock. He looks exactly the same as he did the last time she saw him: a little unkempt, a little worse for wear, but unmistakably hers. She wouldn’t have him any other way. Lucy looks up to Wyatt, eyes so wide she can feel the tired lines under them stretching out. “Wh- _How_?”

“I convinced Agent Christopher to let me and Rufus jump back to when you were fourteen, broke into your house in the middle of the night and stole him from the goodwill box before your mom took it to donate.”

“…You did?”

Wyatt snorts. “For someone so smart, you can be really gullible sometimes, you know that?” Lucy hits his arm with the back of her hand: half laughing with him, half in tears. "I'm good, but I'm not that good."

“ _How_ , Wyatt? How on earth-?”

Wyatt scratches the back of his and shrugs casually, as though it’s nothing that he’s somehow located a teddy not seen in this timeline for over fifteen years. “It’s kind of a long story”

“One you’re going to tell me, right now,” Lucy demands, hugging Ted to her chest.

“Well, you said it was some kind of Christian Mission charity? Which narrowed the options down to only a couple in the area. And there was one I went that happened to keep weirdly detailed ledgers of donations and who they came from- and sure enough, in the year you were fourteen Carol Preston donates a few boxes on July 16th so I could be fairly sure it was the one. I asked around, and one of the women there actually remembered the box of toys specifically, because it had been given away without the approval of the managers when it had a fairly rare Barbie doll in it that they wanted to get valued before it was passed on to anyone else.”

“I remember that Barbie! That was one of the toys my mom tried to get me interested in when Ted started getting ratty—when she told me I’d have to keep in in the box or it’d be worthless in the future, I went back to Ted.”

“She remembered that the box had gone to a Children’s Health Centre about twenty miles or so from here? So I went there, and asked around. Most of the toys had gone but they let me have a poke around and I eventually found the box and sure enough, there he was. Still there in the same box. I don’t think they ever put him out in the waiting area because he was so…” he searches for a polite word to use in Ted’s presence- “... _disheveled_? So, here he is.”

It’s literally the most ridiculous thing she’s ever heard. She almost believes he actually did take the Lifeboat out over what he’s just told her, time travel rules be damned.

“Wyatt, I- I don’t know what to say…”

He shrugs again. “It only took me a day. I wasn’t even remotely expecting to find him, to be honest- I just had a look around on the off-chance. But once I had a solid lead it was easy- I had a whole lot of good luck more than anything else.”

Lucy is more than aware that he’s missing a huge chunk of his story out: the part where he even remembered her stupid teddy, and decided to use his limited free time searching him out for her- for no other reason than to make her world make a little more sense again.

It’s probably the nicest thing anyone’s ever done for her. No, not probably. Definitely.

“I mean, you know how I feel about fate,” he continues. He reaches out and lightly thumbs one of Ted’s ears. “But the sheer amount of good luck I had finding him, I don’t know. Felt like the universe was guiding this one just a little bit.”

Lucy smiles a weak smile, her lip wobbling. She gathers Ted close and dips her nose into him again- he smells just a little musty now from years spent in a cupboard but it’s still there, that warmth and welcoming feeling. A small but significant part of her, that’s been wound up since God knows how when, unclenches and lets her breathe a little deeper.

Home.

Wyatt’s watching her when she looks up through embarrassingly watery eyes. God, he has to go and do shit like this for her. He has to go and be the most thoughtful, generous person and not even realise it. It’s infuriating, really it is. Things were easier when she could still be convinced by her list of Things Lucy Preston Hates About Wyatt Logan. It’s become notably sparse – items either begrudging moved to Things About Wyatt Logan Lucy Preston is Reluctantly Endeared By or becoming so familiar and just plain him that she can’t find it in her hate them anymore.

(Still, ‘Reluctantly Endeared’ is as far as she’s willing to take her mental lists regarding him. Even if there are an increasing number things that don’t fit comfortably there anymore, that demand reclassification onto a more strongly titled register. Such as spending a whole damn day looking for a teddy bear she mentioned to him twice, months ago.)

He folds his arms and looks away from her, considering his words. “And it makes me think…”

He doesn’t elaborate, looking like he’s talking himself out of finishing the thought. She isn’t going to let that happen without a fight. “What?”

“It just makes me think that- that maybe the universe or whatever it is guiding all of this, wants to restore the things you lost, it just... needs the opportunity.” Lucy can’t reply past the emotion in her chest rising up to line her throat. Wyatt reads her silence as disapproval. “I don’t know. I’m talking out my ass again, ignore-”

That’s the sentence she doesn’t let him finish, because she isn’t willing to let him labour under that delusion when he’s almost singlehandedly restored her faith in all of this. Lucy throws her arms around his neck instead almost tight enough to lift her feet from the ground. Ted sits on his shoulder, still clutched in her hand.

“Thank you, Wyatt.” She’s half sure he won’t hear her, the sound muffled in the crook of his neck and his shoulder. She just hopes he gets how much she means it somehow anyway. “Thank you.”

Lucy hears him breathe out, feels him comb her hair away. It’s reluctantly endearing as hell.

“Happy birthday, Lucy.”

  

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> I get the feeling this is seriously contrived now I'm actually about to post it but please try to go with it for the sake of cuteness lmao - tell me what you think !


End file.
